You stopped at the saliva because you wanted to keep the review PG-13?

The first draft was more graphic, yes, and the saliva ended up in more places than Arissa's mouth.

my best friend has finally seen all the Trek shows except ENT, and her favorite is... Voyager!

Oh dear. As someone that once had a best friend that was a Voyager fan, I speak from experience when I say that your friendship just wont last. End it now, don't let the pain drag on, it will hurt more in the long run.

Spock/Uhura Fan wrote:

I really liked this episode. As for the "penis" issue, I always imagined that he didn't have a problem forming one because he had been human and knew what his own penis was like at that time.

Oh yeah, I had completely forgotten that Odo had a penis there for a while. Perhaps part of the punishment was that the Founders gave him a really small one, it seems like something they'd do.

Business as Usual (***)

Being a pansy liberal from a small neutral country where guns are heavily regulated, I am, of course, an expert on the arms trade. Or not. Probably not, now that I come to think of it. As someone not in the know, I kinda imagine that the arms trade is a business like most others, where people wear suits and attend weekly department meetings where they discuss sales while staring at graphs. But in the future, the interstellar arms trade seems to work more like a camp mafia organisation. There's murder, sit-downs, business deals with sociopaths, and other such tropes. It's like watching The Sopranos, but with Tony as a flamboyant Englishman that buys Paulie jewellery as reward for a job well done.

That's a problem for this episode, it's very one-sided in how it depicts the arms trade, they're moral-less schemers out to make a quick buck out of death and destruction. And that's kinda true, but things are a bit more complex than that. Sometimes, people need weapons to fight against oppression, and the episode actually addresses this point when it's revealed that Hagath sold weapons to the Bajorans while they were fighting the Cardassians. But that complexity goes away again almost as soon as it's brought up, and the show returns to the heartless Hagath and his sinister business. The best villains are the ones that think they're the good guy, even Tony Soprano didn't think of himself as a monster. But Hagath doesn't even attempt to rationalise his actions, he likes money and he can make a lot of it by selling weapons to dictators. Steven Berkoff has some fun with the role, but there's not much under the surface to make the character really interesting.

If you ignore those issues and approach the episode as a character story for Quark, it's pretty good. He's brought to the brink, gets involved in a business he never wanted to be involved in, gets in over his head, and struggles to find a way out. It's not an original story, but it works, and Armin Shimerman does a good job with with it. It continues his arc as a character that's being "corrupted" by the insidious Federation, and it's always nice when Quark gets a meaty part rather than being dumped with the role of comic relief.